Teachers’ Work: curriculum restructuring, culture, power and comprehensive schooling

Abstract

In recent years we have seen a rapid change in the nature and structure of teachers’ work. At one level this has been most immediately experienced within the context of the restratification and restructuring of comprehensive schooling. In the projected post‐Fordist era with its emphasis on small‐scale, flexible team work, within a differentiated market‐place, new school systems are being developed that are helping to shape new teaching cultures. This case study critically examines the specificity of the institutional dialectical dynamics of how recent policy impacts on teacher cultures and in turn how teacher cultures impact on policy. It is suggested that within a profession in transition, a new teacher may be emerging for the 1990s.